Dedalus continues its explorations into the offbeat and downright weird with this collection of occult fiction. Occult fiction? Hitherto, I would have said that "occult fiction" was another way of saying "silly old rubbish". Certainly, my heart did sink a little bit when I noticed that the book begins with an extract from Beckford's Vathek. I had to endure that work at university and always wondered what on earth it was doing in the syllabus of English literature, let alone the canon.

Time has mellowed me, and besides, there is some great fun to be had with this anthology. It's not only Dedalus which is experienced in occult matters; the editor, Gary Lachman, is a prodigious writer on such matters and has produced books with such titles as Turn off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Aquarian Age . (He has also written on Gurdjieff, and I have a nasty feeling he takes Madame Blavatsky at least partly seriously; but then he has also written the best rock memoir I have ever read: New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop and Others. You may know Lachman better as Gary Valentine, founding bassist of Blondie and the man who gave the world, among other gems, "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear", which Blondie still have the good sense to include in their live set.)

Lachman, though, is no crank. "An anthology of occult writings by occultists might be interesting," he says in his introduction (and that "might" inspires confidence in sceptics like myself), "but it wouldn't tell us anything we didn't know. My aim in bringing together these disparate works is to show that, far from the marginal phenomenon we generally think it is, occultism had a powerful impact on much of mainstream culture." Or, to put it another way, among some curiosities that might never have resurfaced, there are works by Goethe, De Maupassant, Balzac, ETA Hoffmann, part of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki, extracts from Nerval, Huysmans, HG Wells and, from our own era, Robert Irwin.

Lachman has found in these stories such a strong linking thread that not only will you marvel that precisely the same interest in the world of hidden forms, or the form of hidden worlds, has animated so many authors, you may even begin to think there's something in it. I certainly got a frisson from the moment in Hoffman's "The Golden Flower Pot" when the hero, Anselm, imprisoned in a glass jar by a witch, notices a group of "schoolboys and articled clerks" also imprisoned in glass jars. He despairs at their predicament, but is mocked: "This student's mad! He imagines he's stuck in a glass jar when he's in the middle of the bridge over the Elbe, looking down at the water. Let's go on."

And I had wondered why Lachman was mentioning The Matrix in his introduction. That film, like many of the stories here, presupposes a world, typically sinister, that exists hidden from our own imperfect sight. ("I don't have a problem with this," wrote Eric Korn when he reviewed The Matrix for the TLS. "It has often seemed the most reasonable explanation for what appears to be going on.") You don't have to buy into this to enjoy it; but it helps, particularly if you're reading it by a sputtering fire in an empty house in the dead of winter. There is a time and a place for these stories: it is now.

There is a wonderful piece of high-grade corn - one of a series of stories featuring a psychic version of Sherlock Homes called Dr John Silence, if you please - in Algernon Blackwood's "A Victim of Higher Space". A man named Racine Mudge finds himself involuntarily and nightmarishly transported into the fourth dimension - he vanishes into the higher space, and can reappear anywhere - whenever he hears Wagner. "Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice in the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was nevertheless the fact." I would have dismissed that as the most contrived coincidence were it not for the fact that as I write this, I am listening to Radio 3 playing the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan. Is that spoo...